One Last Choice
by AuroraExecution
Summary: Choices were never a problem for Legolas, but too many years have passed, and the memories hurt when he thinks about them. Go, or die?


**Disclaimer:** Yah, angsty elf-princes belong to Tolkien, and not me. The angst belongs to me though, at least partially.

Notes: So...sorry if this is vague or hard to understand. The choice he is making is never stated clearly, but if you're a hardcore fan, you should be able to figure it out. If you haven't by the end, I've explained things there. Please leave me a comment if you can. Thank you.

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One Last Choice

Deciding had been the least of his worries for all his life. He'd never had any difficulty choosing what to do, at critical moments, within fractions of time. When faced with a troll or an army of orcs or a pack of wargs, he could immediately nock an arrow, or several of them, and begin his onslaught, knives and arrows flying. He barely had to think before plunging in to some dark, dripping cave or off the path in the forests of his home. He had never hesitated to take up a challenge, and he did not even pause in his own sorrow when he needed to help his friends move on. Choices were easy for him.

Perhaps it was because his choices had been very limited. He could choose the way that would allow him to survive, or he could choose the way that would cause a large amount of pain and death to all. He could move into battles and deep places and ignore his own pain, or he and his friends and his people would die. Those were his choices, and therefore, the right choice was always obvious.

He never really had to choose, because there never really was a choice. Go, or die. That was all. And dying was never truly an option.

_Ai_, how he missed that past era, when there had been danger and death waiting in every crevice of every mountain, when battle lurked at his door, and when his friends stood by his side. They were all of them dead. Some sooner and some later, but all were gone. The fear and evil in the world had been defeated, and things came to peace. But what consolation was that? There was no excitement any longer, no one to stand back-to-back with him before certain death.

Feeling had slowly drained out of him over the years, as his heart slowly enclosed pain within, building up thicker and thicker shells of protection around it. One by one, the people he loved faded away, and the memories in his mind grew brighter—so bright they hurt when he thought about them, in the way the sun hurt his eyes when he looked at it. But even though they hurt, he thought about them still, because if they were not a solace in his hazy, mindless days, at least they were _something_. At least he had a shred of the shining picture that was his past, and he could look at it sometimes and imagine the picture as it was when it was whole.

He could pretend the picture was not torn. He could pretend, and remember, and sometimes misery was a bitter comfort, or it was company when there was no one else. Other times he wondered if the picture was worth the nonexistent tears that he could not cry.

So, why now? Why did the choice come now—the choice he did not know how to make? Now, when he could not ask for help making the choice, he who had never _needed_ help making any choice before. Now, that he least wanted to make any choice. He supposed if he were faced with a horde of goblins today, he would have made the wrong choice, the one he would never have chosen back in his home world.

Home. How long had it been since he had left? Much too long. Ironic, how he had departed, thinking he would find a new home across the sea, but after he arrived here, he was the only one who could not find home. It had been mild, at the beginning, but time carried with it more longing and less succor, like a gentle flame that was almost imperceptible until the heart was completely burned away.

And so, he had a choice now. After so much time, he had finally lost his grasp on life, floating gently into the wispy world of daydream. Now, he was given this decision—force his dying body to live again, or give it the rest it sought. In the end, he realized, it was still the same choice it had always been: go, or die. In a way, though, it was the last one he would have to make of its kind. If he chose to live now, he would always have to live, and there would be no alternative again. And if he died now, he would have no opportunity to return to that world of life-and-death choices.

Perhaps, he reflected, he had known all along what his choice would be. As he had always known, there would only ever be one way to decide. If he was the kind who would choose to die, he would have done so a very long time ago.

Let me keep my memories, painful and primitive as they are.

Let me live a life in which every breath is painful to take, in which each heartbeat requires more strength of will than the last.

Let me reject the healing I came here to seek, and embrace a world of not-tears.

Let me choose to go, onward, forever.

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The choice he is making is that of whether he should accept the healing of Valinor, which would involve him forgetting his entire past, or if he should continue as before, and force himself to remember. I kind of did some assuming from what Elrond says to Arwen about departing West--that if she leaves, her past life would be like a dream. I just took it a step further, and assumed the person would actually forget everything...or at least, it turning into a dream would be almost the equivalent of forgetting.

I'd like to add an extra note about the above-mentioned assumptions. As someone pointed out in a review, going on that assumption completely would mean all the elves forget everything about everything. That is not what I meant to imply in the fic. I used the above assumptions, but only in part. My idea, at least for this fic, is that all the elves (and whoever else) that go to Valinor can accept the "healing of Valinor" that would make all the painful things in their pasts become like a dream, or they can reject this "healing" and keep remembering. It's not necessarily a choice in that someone would actually say, "Do you want to forget or remember?", but perhaps more of a choice that involves one's own inner conflict. Sort of like Valinor is the kind of place where, if you WANT to forget, things will sort of fade away and it'll be less painful, but if you choose to remember, then things will stay pretty much the same. I'd also like to add that there is such a thing as personal interpretation, and I am sorry if my interpretation does not match yours, but I'm not going to change my fic. Sorry.

Anyway, do leave a review if you liked it.

Cheers.


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